Sorry to make lots of posts, but History.com suggests she knew:
That matches my understanding. When she made her stand, she knew the implications of it and knew that there was a very good chance she’d be pushing the cause forward significantly.
And that’s an awesome thing, awesomer than just some lady getting tired and refusing to put up with racist bullshit.
I wish the OP would return to help answer these questions. It sounds like he’s got a Rosa Parks expert living in his house.
I don’t see any evidence of this at all any of the readings I’ve seen. Unlike all the sit-ins that came later, to my knowledge there was never any mass attempt to train people in staging protests on the bus. The others who came before Parks did it alone.
I read that Park’s husband was upset with her for getting herself arrested. You’d think that if she was going around talking about being a test case, he would be emotionally prepared to handle what happened. This suggests that this had been a surprise move on her part.
That makes sense. Talking about it and planning is a lot stronger than knowing about the possibility.
Still, she was secretary of the local NAACP; isn’t this where the discussions were happening? It seems pretty likely to me that she was at least tangentially involved in those discussions, if that’s really where they occurred.
I’m not sure what you’re saying that she really knew. There’s not any question she knew that by being resisting the bus drivers orders, she’d be arrested and that there was a good chance the NACCP could use her as the case they were waiting for.
That’s completely different than saying the NACCP put her up to the whole thing and they in knew dvance she was going to be “the one”, right?
Yes, I agree. The story is actually weaker the other way.
Hold up, that’s not what I’m saying, and I don’t think it’s what I ever said. It may well be that nobody ever discussed her potential as a test case–I’m not sure on that bit–but definitely I don’t think the NAACP put her up to it, nor that she knew she was going to do it.
My understanding prior to this thread is that she’d discussed possibly being a test case. I’m now seriously doubting that part. But it’s important that she knew about the plans for a test case and was making a decision with strategic ramifications, not simply a one-off refusal to take the bullshit.
Sexism was a major problem back then. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we have no reason to believe a relatively obscure, low level secretary would have been invited into strategic meetings with Dixon and the other male mucketymucks.
Her work in the NACCP no doubt kept her apprised of what was going on and gave her insight into what character traits they were looking for in causes worth their time and energy.
Oh, ok. Thanks for clarifying. Like I said, that part isn’t really doubt though. She knew about Claudette and the others who came before her, and she knew why the NACCP didn’t catalyze mass action for them.
I may be misunderstanding what “secretary” means in this context: when folks talk about being the secretary of a nonprofit as an unpaid position, IME it generally is a job occupied by a member of the board of directors. Is that not what it means here?
If not, you’re right that sexism might keep her out of the discussions. However, if they were looking for a woman to serve as the test case, I’m not sure we have evidence they would have avoided talking to women about the strategy.
Keep in mind that my entrance into the thread was discussing omissions from children’s books on the subject :). In the several children’s books I’ve read about Parks, that part isn’t mentioned at all.
At the risk ninja’ing you with the face, here is what wikipedia says:
Yikes. Okay, yeah, it seems a bit unlikely in that environment she’d be invited to participate in strategic planning.
From her Wikipedia page:
The more I read about her, the more impressive she becomes. To be dealing with sexism and racism and still keeping your spine straight…they don’t make them like this no more.
Damn, monstro!
She was the State Secretary, to be exact. I’m not sure exactly what that entails, though. She also knew Claudette Colvin well and it seems likely that she would have known that Claudette’s case was considered and rejected as a test case.
In the (poorly formatted) transcript linked above, E.D. Nixon also talks about organizing the boycott *after *the arrest.
The library in downtown Montgomery is named the Juliette Hampton Morgan Library after a librarian at the time who was white, from a politically well connected and socially prominent family, and was a card carrying member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and all the other “league of uptown white ladies” associations. She also rode the buses because she had anxiety disorder and could not drive, and she had frequently witnessed the rudeness and cruelty of the bus drivers to blacks. When the bus boycott began she wrote letters to the editor supporting it.
Doesn’t exactly sound radical, does it?
A cross was burned on her front lawn, and her residence was trashed. A petition started demanding that she be fired and the mayor asked for her resignation. She refused at first, and to their credit the library board backed her, and since the mayor did not have the authority to fire her himself she kept her job. As a result there were protests at the library, people showed up to tear up their library cards, the library budget was threatened, she was called all manner of names at the library by patrons, She received death threats at home and there were bomb threats called in to the library.
She ultimately resigned to protect her coworkers and because she could no longer take it. The next day, she killed herself. (As mentioned, she had an anxiety disorder already.)
Again, this was a white woman from a well-to-do family who went to the “right” churches and belonged to the “right” clubs and whose middle name was an homage to Confederate general Wade Hampton, and she was harassed until she killed herself for writing letters to the editor. That is how terrifying 1955 Montgomery was. Rosa Parks was risking her life and she knew it.
I’ve never understood the criticism that somehow Parks planning on getting arrested undermined the significance of her actions. It’s not like she planned a stunt so that she could get her own reality show, she planned to get arrested, in the Jim Crow South to set the stage for changing a racist policy. What’s wrong with well thought out activism? Think about how scary it must have been sitting there, waiting for the white racist cops to haul you away.
It’s kind of like walking up to the biggest bully in school but unknown to them you’ve studied martial arts and are wearing some padding under your clothes. Doesn’t make you less brave, just smarter and better prepared, and there are many ways it could still go wrong.
I apologize for saying it again and again, but it is hard for some people to conceive: people were murdered in cold blood in front of witnesses for standing up to Jim Crow, and their murderers got away free and clear. Had Rosa Parks been killed she’d have been far from the first and far from the last, and she knew this. One reason she ultimately went to her brother in Detroit- and she said this- was her physical safety; not even the Alabama KKK was stupid enough to try and start some crap in a predominantly black area of Detroit.
Aside, but Rosa’s grandfather was an interesting ornery old cuss who it’s easy to like. His name was Sylvester Edwards, he was the son of a light skinned slave and her white owner, and he was so light skinned he could have crossed the color line if he wanted- at least one of his brothers did- but he didn’t want to. In an era when black men were called boy or at best by their first name by white men and where if a white man was named Sam Jones a black man was supposed to call him “Mister Sam” or “Mister Jones”, he would introduce himself to white men as “Hello Sam, I’m Mister Edwards”; this wasn’t illegal, but it was very much an “up yours” to custom and whites didn’t like it. When it was rumored the KKK was coming for him he stood in the middle of Pine Level (the community about 20 miles outside of Montgomery- still predominantly impoverished and rural) and announced to everybody he slept with a pistol in his pocket and a rifle by his side and that if the Klan came to his house he was going to turn some white hoods red, and that he might not kill them all before they got him but he knew for damned sure he’d get the first two or three.
He raised Rosa and her brother, also named Sylvester, after her parents split up. He did not want her to ever become a maid- he broke his back in the fields to educate her mother (who became a teacher)- but unfortunately she had to from time to time because of the realities of the 20th century Alabama economy. Still, having a grandfather who was ornery and owned his own land (wasn’t rich, but the little farm he had was his) and a mother who was one of the few black women who’d been to college also better prepared Rosa to be the David more than it did most women or men of her era.
(I’ve mentioned before that I met Rosa Parks a couple of times when she stayed in hotels where I worked and found her to be, quite frankly, a very cantankerous old woman. This disappointed me at first, but it quickly occurred that a timid and sweet little church lady couldn’t have done what she did.)
Trivia but I’ll mention because it’s interesting (if only to me): Rosa had another white great-grandfather she knew as a child. He was a penniless Irish-American from up north and fell in love with her grandmother when she was still a slave and claimed to be a mulatto so that he could marry her when freedom came. Their daughter was married to Sylvester Edwards, the grandfather mentioned above. (Source: Rosa Parks’s My Story.)
She also told about an old white woman she used to fish with when she was a little girl. She couldn’t remember her name if she ever knew it, but the old woman was kind and clearly couldn’t care less about her race and they’d share what they had- a can of Vienna Sausages and some peanuts would be a feast- when they fished. She said that during the Boycott era it was this simple memory of an old woman being kind to a child without regard to race and of the great-grandfather who illegally married and raised a family with her great-grandmother that sometimes kept her from hating all white people.